


a cracked smile

by JaguarCello



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen, they fuck you up, tw: abuse, tw: sadism, tw: torture, your mum and your dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 15:46:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaguarCello/pseuds/JaguarCello
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That smile became his trademark; he’d beam winningly at his foster-mother to get an extra helping at dinner, and she – resentful of him, but not as much as she loathed her step-son – would roll her eyes but agree; he’d smirk – years later – at the local girls and they’d smirk back, and follow him into bed; he’d grin at his new brothers (and it was strange, at first, to have brothers who did not hit him) when they were being told off for some misdemeanour, until they’d mutter curses at him, and his face split into a smile when he realised he was in love with Robb Stark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a cracked smile

**Author's Note:**

> this is for Theon Week  
> (it's fairly graphic and I might continue idk)
> 
> [I own none of the characters; this is based off the HBO characterisations of GRRM's asoiaf, and none of the place names, people or established events mentioned as canon are my intellectual property]

When he’d been very young, his father had sat him down and told him about his ancestors. “What is dead may never die,” he’d been told, and his father’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows had been set in a frown ever since he’d tried to question the statement – citing hamsters and weakling puppies, but his father had ignored that.

 The stories had interested him, though. Priests drowned, and then having the life forced back into them, drowned men feasting with mermaids in watery halls in the deep, and how they’d carved a living from rock and salt and the crash of waves – “We were born to carve out kingdoms from blood and fire and song, to rape and to take what is ours,” his father had told him, and Theon had tried hard to understand. His father had done just that, though, in some sort of embezzlement scandal that had involved him being sent far from home, from the influence of his father.

  He was fostered to an old “friend” – said with gritted teeth by his mother, and snarled by his father – far to the north, where grass grew long and meadows were full of flowers, not stones hurled up in storms to settle in the scrub. The snows were deep, and settled – at home, the winter had created gales, and old men had muttered behind their beards about the Storm God battling the Drowned God, until they’d been silenced by the onslaught of age and disease and bodies bent and weathered by the islands.

 They did not fish on the islands, not any more. Fishermen were clinging like barnacles to a tradition that held little meaning once quotas had been set up, and government – albeit, a government biting its own tail, with political assassination at every turn – regulation had depleted their stocks, crippling their economy. Some talked of returning to the old ways, to theft and rape and reave, but they sat sullenly on Facebook to complain about the situation. The islands were dying, and Theon wouldn’t miss the crags and sharp cliff faces, the ever-present wailing of gulls, the curiously human murmur of the sea against his window, when at last they would sink into the embrace of their god.

 He was pragmatic enough, at least, when leaving home – in the night, accompanied by a grim-faced police officer who ignored his questions – to leave behind his suspicions about the god of the islands, and he arrived in Winterfell within the week with a smile fixed on his face.

 That smile became his trademark; he’d beam winningly at his foster-mother to get an extra helping at dinner, and she – resentful of him, but not as much as she loathed her step-son – would roll her eyes but agree; he’d smirk – years later – at the local girls and they’d smirk back, and follow him into bed; he’d grin at his new brothers (and it was strange, at first, to have brothers who did not hit him) when they were being told off for some misdemeanour, until they’d mutter curses at him, and his face split into a smile when he realised he was in love with Robb Stark.

 “Shit,” Robb had said, trying to force French into his brain. “I can’t remember any of this,” he’d gone on, waving the list of vocabulary in desperation. He was eighteen, cramming for exams, and Theon was lounging on his bed next to him, having done the exam three years previously, drinking from a bottle stolen from the kitchen.

 “Theon,” Robb began, tone more wheedling than he’d ever heard from anyone, and he rolled over to look him full in the face. “You aced this, didn’t you?” and he’d never begged for anything in his life, and Theon hadn’t been able to look away.

 “Look, Stark, we can’t all be geniuses – “ and Robb had elbowed him sharply, and of course – because he was an _idiot_ – he sighed, and pulled the list towards him.

 “ _Un chômeur_ ,” he read, smile wide, and Robb rolled his eyes.

 “An unemployed person, and fuck you, because you don’t have a job either – “ and Theon laughed at that.

 “I may not have a job, but I have money,” he reminded Robb – whose strict moral code meant he couldn’t take any money he’d not earned, and he’d only sleep with girls when he knew their name and probably their insurance details, and he’d only drink to celebrate. “My dear father remembers I exist from time to time – “

 Robb sat up, face serious. “Is that what this is about?” and he gestured to Theon,  to the ashtrays overflowing and the stubble on his face and the bottle hanging loosely from his fingers. “Have you been talking to your father?”

 Theon’s smile tilted, twisted, and he laughed against the lid of the bottle. “Yes, he wants me to go back to live with him – the courts have okayed it,” and his laugh was more bitter this time. “But he also wants me to be like him – you know, harsh as the hewn rocks,” his voice was booming now, an echo from his past, and Robb frowned.

 “You don’t have to go,” he muttered, and it sounded childish and petty to even his ears. “I mean – “

 Theon grinned again, and tilted his head back, exposing the long white lines of his throat. “If I have any hope of inheriting my father’s beleaguered kingdom – what of it he’s managed to squirrel away from the tax-man, that is – I have to go,” and Robb (who understood the perils of inheritance more than most) only nodded, and pulled the list towards himself.

 Theon had left that day, washed and resplendent in the finest clothes he had. He’d – long ago, on the islands – thought fine clothes were a frippery, and preferred the salt-stiff smocks they wore on the islands, the same as long ago, but now he was groomed and neat and wearing what would have passed for designer.

 (His father, predictably, had scorned him and laughed at his clothes, and – desperate to prove himself, that he was not softened by the Starks– he’d started down a road that had ended with him tied to Ramsay Bolton’s wall.)

 Ramsay Bolton was dangerous. His eyes were pale, like the eyes of a blind man, and his smile was a shark’s smile, a crocodile leer, and his laugh was high and cruel. He was magnetic, though, and Theon’s traitor compass had lead him to this. It had been interesting, at first. Back when it had just been soft silk at his wrists, and kisses down his back – but it changed, quickened, and Ramsay’s pale eyes had hardened, and so had his hands.

 “There are no happy endings,” Ramsay had promised, carving patterns into his back and dripping molten wax down his legs and slicing at his skin, and Theon had believed him.

Laughably – not that he could remember how to laugh - Theon had almost welcomed the attention, initially. Ramsay had been an escape from thinking about Robb, from thinking about his father, from wondering about who he could find that night with red-brown hair and blue eyes to lose himself in. Soon, however – and he couldn’t be sure what point it was when the kisses turned to punches and the whispering turned to howling hatred into his ear – he noticed what was happening to him, the slow decline of his personality, the creeping fear that crept under his battered skin, the icy terror that shot through him when he saw those pale eyes looking at him from hooded lids.

 He didn’t smile anymore; when his lips split now, the skin spliced and blood ran down his face. He had supposed Ramsay liked that, because he’d be wilder with him that night. He’d taken to going away inside his head, to dream of the sea and the stars and the sky, the gentle rolling meadows and green hills of Winterfell, and the way Robb’s eyes had lit up when he’d got his first car, and the god he’d believed in that now would ask his forgiveness.

 He got away after six months, leaving half his soul and a couple of fingers behind him; a neighbour had refused to be placated by the sex-game stories that Ramsay had told him, especially when the blood had started to drip through the ceiling—plaster, and the screams were strangled and raw, and Ramsay was locked away forever.

 Theon still dreamed about his eyes, though. The way they’d light up when he found a new coat-hanger or corkscrew or electrode, the way they’d drag their gaze across his body lazily, and then swoop around the room for a new “toy”, as he called them. “There are no happy endings,” Theon reminded himself, as he approached Winterfell, and he believed it when he looked at Robb and saw hatred in those blue eyes – the blue of the ocean on a clear day; Theon’s eyes were more grey, the sea in a storm.

   “Greyjoy,” Robb started, carefully, and then caught sight of the missing fingers. His eyes flickered over the scars on Theon’s hands, the shadows under his eyes, the hollows of his cheeks and the slashes that criss-crossed his scalp, and he blinked, once. Asha had told him about Ramsay, the things he’d used on Theon, and the name that Theon had scratched into the plaster of the room, scratching until his fingernails flaked away and he was writing in blood, and Robb nodded once. He looked more beautiful than ever, and his face hadn’t changed since Theon had boarded the train back down south.

 “You’d best come in,” he said, and Theon followed him into the darkness of the hallway. 


End file.
